Alla Abdunabi’s In the Stomach of the Earth reconstructs a Roman vivarium from ancient Apollonia, Libya, reflecting on the shifting relationship between humans, the sea, containment, and the passage of time.
In the Stomach of the Earth
Life begins in the womb that holds the sea within it. All while the earth is alive beneath the water's surface. Salt builds up. Stone softens. The body, after all, is not only shaped by water but organised by it.
Rooted in North African imaginaries and symbolism, the exhibition draws on a visual and material language where water holds both protective and cosmological significance. Across bronze, ceramic, glass, and sand, the works explore how perception is never fixed, always partial. The sea appears repeatedly. Its symbolism and metaphor linger in unlikely places: mirrored in the mouth of a fish or invoked by the shape of a vessel long emptied. Across the works, meaning slowly surfaces slowly: distorted, refracted, and transformed, somewhere deep in the stomach of the earth.